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the favour of this worthy gentleman I owe the know. ledge of one particular, in honour of our poet's once dwelling-house, of which, I presume, Mr. Rowe never was apprized. When the civil war raged in England, and king Charles the First's queen was driven by the necessity of affairs to make a recess in Warwickshire, she kept her court for three weeks in New-Place. We may reasonably suppose it then the best private house in the town; and her majesty preferred it to the college, which was in the possession of the Combe family, who did not so strongly favour the king's party.

How much our author employed himself in poetry, after his retirement from the stage, does not so evidently appear: very few posthumous sketches of his pen have been recovered to ascertain that point. We have been told, indeed, in print *, but not till very lately, that two large chests full of this great man's loose papers and manuscripts, in the hands of an ignonorant baker of Warwick (who married one of the descendants from our Shakspere), were carelessly scattered and thrown about as garret-lumber and litter, to the particular knowledge of the late Sir William Bishop, till they were all consumed in the general fire and destruction of that town. I cannot help being a little apt to distrust the authority of this tradition, because his wife survived him seven years; and, as his

* See an answer to Mr. Pope's Preface to Shakspere, by a Strolling Player, 8vo. 1729, p. 45.

REED.

favourite

favourite daughter Susanna survived her twenty-six years, it is very improbable they should suffer such a treasure to be removed, and translated into a remoter branch of the family, without a scrutiny first made into the value of it. This, I say, inclines me to distrust the authority of the relation: but, notwithstanding such an apparent improbability, if we really lost such a treasure, by whatever fatality or caprice of fortune they came into such ignorant and neglectful hands, I agree with the relater, the misfortune is wholly irreparable.

To these particulars, which regard his person and private life, some few more are to be gleaned from Mr. Rowe's Account of his Life and Writings: let us now take a short view of him in his publick capacity as a writer and, from thence, the transition will be easy to the state in which his writings have been handed down to us.

No age, perhaps, can produce an author more various from himself, than Shakspere has been universally acknowledged to be. The diversity in style, and other parts of composition, so obvious in him, is as variously to be accounted for. His education, we find, was at best but begun: and he started early into a science from the force of genius, unequally assisted by acquired improvements. His fire, spirit, and exuberance of imagination, gave an impetuosity to his pen : his ideas flowed from him in a stream rapid, but not turbulent; copious, but not ever overbearing its

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shores. The ease and sweetness of his temper might not a little contribute to his facility in writing; as his employment, as a player, gave him an advantage and habit of fancying himself the very character he meant to delineate. He used the helps of his function in forming himself to create and express that sublime, which other actors can only copy, and throw out, in action and graceful attitude. But, Nullum sine venia placuit ingenium, says Seneca. The genius, that gives us the greatest pleasure, sometimes stands in need of our indulgence. Whenever this happens with regard to Shakspere, I would willingly impute it to a vice of his times. We see complaisance enough, in our days, paid to a bad taste. So that his clinches, false wit, and descending beneath himself, may have proceeded from a deference paid to the then reigning barbarism.

I have not thought it out of my province, whenever occasion offered, to take notice of some of our poet's grand touches of nature; some, that do not appear sufficiently such, but in which he seems the most deeply instructed; and to which, no doubt, he has so much owed that happy preservation of his characters, for which he is justly celebrated. Great geniuses, like his, naturally unambitious, are satisfied to conceal their art in these points. It is the foible of your worser poets to make a parade and ostentation of that little science they have; and to throw it out in the most ambitious colours. And whenever a writer of this class shall attempt to copy these artful concealments of our author, and shall either think them easy,

or

or practised by a writer for his ease, he will soon be convinced of his mistake by the difficulty of reaching the imitation of them.

Speret idem, sudet multùm, frustràque laboret,
Ausus idem..

Indeed, to point out and exclaim upon all the beau❤ ties of Shakspere, as they come singly in review, would be as insipid, as endless; as tedious, as unnecessary but the explanation of those beauties that are less obvious to common readers, and whose illustration depends on the rules of just criticism, and an exact knowledge of human life, should deservedly have á share in a general critique upon the author. But to pass over at once to another subject :-

It has been allowed on all hands, how far our author was indebted to nature; it is not so well agreed, how much he owed to languages and acquired learning. The decisions on this subject were certainly set on foot by the hint from Ben Jonson, that he had small Latin, and less Greek and from this tradition, as it were, Mr. Rowe has thought fit peremptorily to declare, that, "It is without controversy, he had no knowledge of "the writings of the ancient poets, for that in his "works we find no traces of any thing which looks "like an imitation of the ancients. For the delicacy "of his taste (continues he) and the natural bent of his own great genius (equal, if not superior, to "some of the best of theirs), would certainly have

"led

"led him to read and study them with so much plea.

sure, that some of their fine images would naturally "have insinuated themselves into, and been mixed "with, his own writings: and so his not copying, "at least, something from them, may be an argu"ment of his never having read them." I shall leave it to the determination of my learned readers, from the numerous passages which I have occasionally quoted in my notes, in which our poet seems closely to have imitated the classicks, whether Mr. Rowe's assertion be so absolutely to be depended on. The result of the controversy must certainly, either way, terminate to our author's honour: how happily he could imitate them, if that point be allowed; or how gloriously he could think like them, without owing any thing to imitation.

Though I should be very unwilling to allow Shakspere so poor a scholar, as many have laboured to represent him, yet I shall be very cautious of declaring too positively on the other side of the question; that is with regard to my opinion of his knowledge in the dead languages. And therefore the passages, that I occasionally quote from the classicks, shall not be urged as proofs that he knowingly imitated those originals; but brought to shew how happily he has expressed himself upon the same topicks. A very learned critick of our own nation has declared, that a sameness of thought, and sameness of expression too, in two writers of a different age, can hardly happen, without a violent suspicion of the latter copying from

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